On Eli Siegel's Explanation of Insanity: True in Africa As in the US (continued)

EDWARD GREEN COMPOSER, MUSIC EDUCATOR / NEW YORK CITY

Contempt: the Cause of Insanity

BY EDWARD GREEN Part 2

III) Madness Can Take This Form

Contempt, Mr. Siegel has explained, is the "temptation of man...to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself." It is interesting that Diop presents Keita as the son of a chief. It could be asked--and this I think is part of the subtlety of Diop's story: did Sergeant Keita feel--simply by being born into "royalty"--that he was better than other people? And did he carry that feeling of superiority with him as he played with other village children, and later as he served in the French colonial army overseas?

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that once a person feels he has a right to be superior--and gets pleasure from that feeling, he will, unconciously, want that pleasure to extend. And once we associate our own "glory" with being superior to other people, we are in danger of hurting not only ourselves, but the people we know--even the people we think we are closest to.

That is what happens with Sergeant Keita. Telling himself he is "educating" his village, he takes actions which trample on their feelings. For example: without even speaking to his father, he takes the sculpture which embodies the Keita family's spirit, the "Nyanaboli," and throws it to the village dogs.

It is a high-handed and brazen act. We feel Keita's contempt has crossed a certain line; that his arrogance has taken on a new intensity. Later that evening, Sergeant Keita goes out of his mind. This is how Diop presents it: Keita is leaning against a tree, inveighing against everyone in his village--young and old--when suddenly:

he felt something like a prick on his left side. He turned his head. When he looked at his listeners again, his eyes were no longer the same. A white, foamy spittle appeared at the corners of his mouth. The spirits, the author says, have taken his mind. Keita howls night and day; and when the narrator meets him, months later, he hears Keita crying out "in a hoarse voice" this chant: Listen to things
More often than beings
Hear the voice of fire
Hear the voice of water
Listen in the wind to the sighs of the bush
This is the ancestors breathing. In Aesthetic Realism lectures Eli Siegel gave about the philosophy of mind, he explained: the self is always critical of itself. That ability--to be honestly self-critical--is the true glory and distinction of humanity; no other living being on Earth possesses it. A person is healthy-minded, and smart about his life, when he is proud of that fact. If we try to evade our self-criticism, we are giving up our humanity, and weakening our minds, perhaps disastrously.

And one result of wanting to run away from ourselves--from our own ethical and critical opinion of who we are, and how justly we are meeting the world outside ourselves--is that we can give ourselves frightening obsessions, such as Keita has, as he, in his insane state, hears the ancestors breathing around him.

IV) What Does the World Deserve From Us?

In Self and World , Mr. Siegel writes: Obsessions are symbolical punishments that we give ourselves because we feel that what the obsessions symbolize has been neglected by us. In Keita's chant it is clear he is punishing himself with a fierce insistence for not wanting to listen respectfully to other people: for wanting, instead, to impose himself on them. Keita was not interested in giving the world and other people what they deserved. Instead, he was wanted to control them. But now, in his insanity, he is no longer able to control his own mind.

As I read this part of Diop's story, it moved me very much, and made for large gratitude. Like Sergeant Keita, and like many people, I once did not listen to other people deeply--family or friends. And the reason, I learned in Aesthetic Realism consultations, was that I had come to the contemptuous conclusion that I had nothing important to learn from them--in fact, that they existed to learn things from me!

As a means of encouraging me to take better care of my life, my consultants suggested that I take part in three conversations that week, each at least a half-hour long, in which I was to say nothing and simply listen, with as much respect as I could, to what other people were saying.

Just hearing this kind suggestion, my life began to change and become better and more integrated. Here I was, a young musician, hoping to become a good composer, but I hated listening! The contradiction was not healthy for me--either as man, or as a musician. And when I did what my consultants encouraged, I enjoyed myself deeply.

Instead of conversations being battlefields--which I too much had made them into all my life; battlefields in which I tried to have victories over other people by showing them I was smarter than they--I began to see vividly how much I had lessened myself by robbing myself of what I could learn from other people.

"Any time we have a chance to like something and don't take it, we ourselves miss something," Eli Siegel writes in the "Preface" to Self and World (Definition Press, New York l989). And he continues:

further, if we like something a bit, but can like it more, we miss something also. So, wherever there has been a possibility of our liking something, and we did not implement this possibility, a loss for us has taken place....The existence, in everyone, as a daily possibility, of the pleasure of contempt, is the great opponent to the pleasure of knowing the world and, perhaps, liking it because one knows it.

V) This is What Contempt Does to Mind

Contempt, Mr. Siegel showed, begins with a person feeling as he lessens other things, he makes himself more important. As Keita's chant continues, we see he is punishing himself for this: for having made the people who lived before him--the ancestors--into nothing. There is a beauty in his ferocious self-criticism as he forces himself to acknowledge there is more life in the world than he earlier had wanted to see, and that the meaning in people which he wanted to put aside, cannot be put aside: Those who are dead are not ever gone
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the moaning of the woods
In the water that runs
In the water that sleeps
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd.
The dead are not dead.
Listen to things As Birago Diop's story ends, we hear one more song--one that accents terror. "All night," the narrator says, "I had heard Sergeant Keita coming and going, howling, weeping, and singing:

Keita has paid a terrible price for his contemptuous victories over people. Trapped now in his own crazed mind, the world has become for him a tormenting prison of darkness and fear.

"A large purpose of Aesthetic Realism," Eli Siegel writes in the "Preface" to Self and World , "is to have a person make up his mind as to the value for him of contempt and respect." And he continues: "Only through aesthetics as the oneness of opposites can he do this." Mr. Diop's story--while not as great as some things in world literature dealing with insanity--does have, in my careful opinion, true aesthetics. Like an tragedy from ancient Greece, it terrifies us, and uplifts us.

"Contempt," Eli Siegel so magnificently explained, "is the great failure of man." And what is man's great success? It is the state of mind from which art arises: the powerful hope to like the world, and see meaning and beauty in it. That state of mind--healthy, honest, free, life-giving--is what the study of Aesthetic Realism can make for. That study is the future happiness of mankind.

To Return to Part 1

[ To Home Page ]